A plan to fight cancer by injecting vaccines directly into cancer cells won the graduate division Tuesday of the Donald W. Reynolds Governor's Cup college business-plan competition.
A group of graduate students at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville developed the business, VivImmune, in conjunction with a laboratory at the school.
Immunotherapies are a new class of cancer therapies that work by teaching a patient's body to fight cancer, according to a description of VivImmune.
"We developed [a cancer immune therapy] that is designed to be injected directly into the tumor," said Sean Smith, a co-inventor of the therapy and a candidate for a doctorate in biomedical engineering. "It acts like a homing beacon, drawing in immune cells. They can remember what the [cancer cells] look like to prevent recurrence."
The therapy has been tested in mice, Smith said. Studies have shown that the therapy can destroy bladder tumors at a rate of more than 90 percent while also preventing recurrence.
The lack of recurrence is as important as destroying the initial tumor, said Corey Coston, a member of the VivImmune team.
VivImmune received $25,000 for winning the competition's graduate division plus $5,000 for winning the Delta Plastics Innovation Award and $2,000 for winning the graduate 90-second elevator-pitch award.
In the graduate competition, Actio Systems from the University of Arkansas won $15,000 for finishing second, and deciLvl of the University of Arkansas won $10,000 for finishing third.
Drone Surveying Solutions of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock won the undergraduate division and also the undergraduate elevator pitch for a total of $27,000.
Drone Surveying uses drones for preventive maintenance for farmers, said Mario Montenegro, the business' chief financial officer.
"We're able to survey their crops on a weekly basis, find hot spots that are bad and let the farmer know so they can tend to these spots before it gets out of hand," Montenegro said.
The company uses a patented spraying device, which is safer, more efficient and better for the environment than alternatives, according to a description of the business. The company also provides topographic mapping with the drones and data storage and retention.
The students got the idea for the business plan from UALR.
"They had one idea we came across that had a spraying device," Montenegro said. "It jump-started from there, and we bounced all these ideas around and eventually came to a drone service."
Montenegro and other Drone Surveying team members figure they would need about $200,000 to get the business idea into operation.
"That's all relative to what we can do first on a smaller scale," Montenegro said. "That amount could obviously come down."
In the undergraduate division, Natural State Bedding Co. from John Brown University finished second and won $15,000. Short-Bow from the University of Central Arkansas finished third and won $10,000.
Other finalists in the undergraduate competition represented at the awards ceremony included AGcorp of Ouachita Baptist University and FindMyWine and Sobek, both of John Brown.
Other finalists in the graduate competition were NuPhase Solutions of the University of Arkansas, Demetrix of Hendrix College and NuShores Bone Regeneration of UALR.
AGCorp won first place and $5,000 for the Arkansas Farm Bureau Agriculture Award, and Natural State Bedding from John Brown finished second and won $3,000.
Natural State Bedding won the undergraduate division of the Delta Plastics Innovation Award and $5,000.
Altogether, $152,000 was awarded Tuesday to the best graduate and undergraduate business plans and their faculty advisers.
The top three teams in the graduate and undergraduate divisions will compete next month in Las Vegas against winning college business plans from Oklahoma and Nevada.
Business on 04/20/2016